Blogroll Simplicity

I’ve been playing around with ways to make the RSS feed of my blogroll a) less time intensive to load and b) more relevant for readers.

Before I started tweaking things yesterday, WP Social Blogroll would pull the RSS feed for every single link in the chosen categories, check it for recent activity, and then post links to the newest entries.

Since I have over a hundred blogs that I’m keeping an eye on… it took forever to load.

Then I stumbled over the awesome plug-in Widget Logic by Alan Trewartha. Now victory is mine!

Widget Logic allows you to show or hide a sidebar widget based on logic that you enter. Combine this with WP Social Blogroll and I’ve got an easy way to show my favorite links on the main page and then category specific links on the subpages.

Splitting the Blogrolls

WP Social Blogroll allows me to display only links from a single category, so I went back and made categories for each of the sublogs as well as one for the main pages.

I sorted things out into the various categories and then went back and dual-tagged my favorites (that I wanted to see on the main pages). That list is going to be tweaked over the next week or so, until I get the right mix of folks… I just have too many favorites!

If/And/Or

Once I had the blogrolls ready I went back in and added seven WP Social Blogroll widgets, one for each category (and I took out the WP Social Blogroll Multi widget that I had been using instead).

I gave each of the widgets a unique title so I could make sure they were showing up on the right pages and then put the following in the category Widget logic :

is_category("everyday-dragons") || (is_single() && in_category("everyday-dragons"))

The widget for the main page I used:

is_home()

NOTE: The is_home did not work until I scrolled to the bottom of the widget page (under Widget Logic options) and checked Use ‘wp_reset_query’ fix, and set the Load logic to ‘when all PHP loaded’.

Shiny!

Now I have much shorter blogrolls with faster load times and I can check up on what each of my subhobbies is doing just by opening that category (or a post within that category).

Victory! 😀